Six months after this decision the Pennsylvania and other Northern roads made these words, "He must pay freight on the barrels," the occasion of an increase of rates, which stopped the refineries of the independents. They were carrying free the heavy tanks--"the most undesirable business we do," in the language of their freight agent. They had been carrying the barrels of the independents free for twenty years. Now, continuing to carry the tank-cars free, they levied a prohibitory transportation tax on the barrels. To cap it all, they declared, in announcing the new rule, that it had been forced upon them by the Interstate Commerce Commission. But the President of the Pennsylvania Railroad is found admitting that it was the oil combination that dictated the move--"the seaboard refiners insisted." "Upon your decision" (in the Rice case) "being promulgated," he wrote the Interstate Commerce Commission, "the seaboard refiners insisted that we were bound to charge for packages," barrels, not tanks, "as well as for the oil."[234] The seaboard refiners were the members of the oil trust; the others at the seaboard had been wiped out years before by the help of the railroads. Though the Pennsylvania Railroad was not a party to the case before the Commission, though it had not been called upon to change its practice, which was what it ought to be, it did now change it from right to wrong. The Commission had ordered that discrimination between the barrel and the tank should cease. The Pennsylvania, which had not, strange to say, been practising that forbidden kind of discrimination, immediately resorted to it, and, stranger still, gave as its reason the order of the Commission against it. It must have been a keen eye that could find in a "qualified and incidental remark," as the Interstate Commerce Commission styles it, in such a decision, a command to charge for the weight of the barrels and increase freight rates; but such an eye there was--an eye that will never sleep as long as Naboth's vineyard belongs to Naboth. All the trunk-line railroads to the East took part in the new regulation--September 3, 1888--that freight must be paid thereafter on the weight of the barrels as well as on the oil itself, and at the same rate. This increased the cost of transportation to New York to 66 cents from 52 cents, and to other points proportionately. Freight rates on the oil of "the seaboard refiners" who shipped in tanks were left untouched. In the circulars announcing the change it was said to be done "in accordance with the directions of the Interstate Commerce Commission."[235] When the refiners whom this advance threatened with ruin wrote to expostulate, they got the same reply from all the railroad officials as from President Roberts of the Pennsylvania Railroad: "The advance in rates ... has been forced upon us by the Interstate Commerce Commission."[236]